st and north, she saw the weatherbeaten _Post_ building, its
distant gray tower cutting mistily out of the dreary sky. From where she
sat she could just pick out, as she had so often noticed before, the
tops of the fifth-floor row of windows, the windows from which the
_Post's_ editorial department looked out upon a world with which it
could not keep faith. Behind one of those windows at this moment, in all
likelihood, sat the false friend who had cut down the reformatory from
behind.

Which was it? Oh, was not Mr. Dayne right, as he always was? Where was
there any room for doubt?

Long before Sharlee knew Charles Gardiner West personally, when she was
a little girl and he just out of college, she had known him by report as
a young man of fine ideals, exalted character, the very pattern of
stainless honor. Her later intimate knowledge of him, she told herself,
had fully borne out the common reputation. Wherever she had touched him,
she had found him generous and sound and sweet. That he was capable of
what seemed to her the baldest and basest treachery was simply
unthinkable. And what reason was there ever to drag his name into her
thought of the affair at all? Was it not Mr. Queed who had written all
the reformatory articles since Colonel Cowles's death--Mr. Queed who had
promised only twenty-four hours ago to do his utmost for the cause at
the critical moment to-day?

And yet ... and yet ... her mind clung desperately to the thought that
possibly the assistant editor had not done this thing, after all. The
memory of his visit to her, less than a week ago, was very vivid in her
mind. What sort of world was it that a man with a face of such shining
honesty could stoop to such shabby dishonesty?--that a man who had
looked at her as he had looked at her that night, could turn again and
strike her such a blow? That Queed should have done this seemed as
inconceivable as that West should have done it. There was the wild
hundredth chance that neither had done it, that the article had been
written by somebody else and published by mistake.

But the hope hardly fluttered its wings before her reason struck it
dead. No, there was no way out there. The fact was too plain that one of
her two good friends, under what pressure she could not guess, had
consented to commit dishonor and, by the same stroke, to wound her so
deeply. For no honest explanation was possible; there was no argument in
the case to-day that was not equally p